Microsoft executive compares iPhone 4 to Vista

"It looks like the iPhone 4 might be their Vista, and I'm okay with that," said Kevin Turner, Microsoft's chief operating officer, in a keynote speech at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), which runs through Thursday in Washington, D.C.

The successor to Windows XP, Vista launched in early 2007 and was heavily criticized by users, and in a series of e-mails that became public during a class-action lawsuit, even by the company's own senior executives. The consensus, deserved or not, has become that Vista was one of Microsoft's worst operating systems.